I hate linkbuilding. In my perfect world, linkbuilding is done scalably via widgets, with a big budget to promote a perfect product. This is pretty much never the case, so manual linkbuilding needs to be done
In January, Michael Martinez posted a long rant about why competitor analysis for link building is a waste of time. My post is about how to get more out of competitor analysis for link building than just links. The extra bit of juice I get out of the process is high level business intelligence. This is my basic process for competitor based linkbuilding, with specific examples from various live linkbuilding campaigns.
I use Open Site Explorer for the link analysis as well as to measure my rate and quality of link acquisition.
1. Find your REAL Competitors
When working with a client, I always ask them who their main competitors are. In most cases they over estimate some brands and underestimate others. They often think only of brick and mortar companies and forget web-only players and content aggregators.
I take a basket of 100 keywords that I think are likely to be the most ROI beneficial to the client and check competition by SERP Saturation.
Example of SERP Saturation for a basket of travel industry keywords
Often this process throws up new sites that no one was aware of, but that have been quietly doing very well
I choose three top competitors and load them into the SEOmoz Campaign Manager. Here is the real data from my UK train industry campaign
2. Understand what Types of Links you Need
I create a range of graphs per competitor from the granular competitor link analysis data. This allows me to see what type of links I need.
When I see that I have all followed links and no nofollowed links, I know I can target low quality, exact match links with little risk of penalties. In the example above, you can see I need to concentrate on getting links from a wide number of sources.
3. Create a Baseline for Measurement
This is very simple. I just record the granular link data from my site and 3 competitors into Excel whenever the SEOmoz crawler updates.
Hotel Industry example:
I can get a very easy view-over-time on what is and has happened to backlinks. Once this data is in excel, its quick to create graphs for visualisations and reporting.
Train industry example:
It is very easy to see we have a significantly increased the number of incoming links in a short space of time.
These graphs keep clients happy but there is more going on behind the scenes.
It is very important to monitor the Domain Authority and homepage Page Authority to make sure that your linkbuilding does not gain links at the expense of reducing your other domain-wide authority metrics.
4. Export a Competitor's Backlinks into Excel
I keep only the URL, Page Authority and Domain Authority columns. Add a column for Action, Category and Notes. The Category column is the real value add.
Sort the list into 100 unique domains, and then by page authority. Then visit each site on the list.
In the Action column, record the action you take (UNO means Unobtainable, I don't think we can get a link etc) In the Category column, categorise the website.
This is the list I use for the train industry:
- News - Quality news site
- Blog - Personal writeup about that company specifically
- Reference Site - Write up that mentions the company as a reference or resource
- Owned Other site - a different website that they own
- Twitter - I will follow them with the Twitter account
- Student Site - specific for each industry
- Timebased Event - specific for each industry
A lot of links are from student sites and a lot are timebased events like past conferences, so I make a specific category for them.
When I email the webmaster, I keep track of the date I sent it, the person's name, the email address I sent it to and any other notes like phone numbers.
I keep an email folder for each linkbuilding campaign that contains all the replies.
I got three great tips from Frank at www.orchidbox.com while writing this post.
- Check the whois email address if there is no email on the site. A bonus here is that these people are less likely to be being spammed, so your email may be received without preconceived scepticism on their part.
- Add a column for whether the site uses Adsense or not. This can allow you to target PPC ads at high quality websites in your niche.
- Add a column for whether the site takes article submissions or not. If you can't get a free link, you can at least write a decent guest post for your link.
5. A Linkbuilding Email Template
Keep it short and simple but do all the important bits.
----------------------
Hi there
Would you add www.clientsite.co.uk/ to your page https://www.yoursite.com/uk/en/careers/student/offices?
They have discounts for buying online and no credit card charges and serve the area your users live in.
Cheers
Stephen
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- Informal, personal where I can get the recipient's name form the website
- Not a lot to read, tells them exactly what I want and where I want it (i.e. Don't make them think!)
- Tells them why giving me a link is good for their users
- Tells them why giving me a link makes their site better
- Doesn't make any wild promises on my site, or suggest anything spammy
- Doesn't take a lot of my time to replicate or personalise, I can shift a lot of these in a day if needed
Don't overthink this. If you are in doubt, just send the email. I have had PR 9 backlinks using this method. Follow up if you need to.
6. Gather your Business Intelligence
Now that the link building is done, segmentation is where you get extra business intelligence. I have two extra columns in my Excel. The example below is from an analysis of links pointing to the www.thetrainline.com.
Actions
Describes the action taken - already have a link, sent email, called, filled form, don’t want etc.
This gives me a good overview of how my links compare to theirs.
Site type
Describes the type of site it is. This changes slightly depending on the site and vertical, there is no hard and fast rule.
This tells me where they get the bulk of their links from and can be used to guide the next phase of linkbuilding strategy as well as in this case, feeding back into actual product development.
7. Turn Business Intelligence into Strategy
Here is some actual feedback to the client based on link analysis of The Trainline.
Geography One of the main reason links are not obtainable, is that The Trainline operates on a larger geographic scale than [client] and therefore gets a larger numbers of targeted links from local organisations. A lot of websites use The Trainline site as a single reference point when they just want to list one place to go to look for cheap tickets. [client] cannot compete as they do not have comprehensive geographical coverage.
Student Student websites are a great source of natural links and are a good fit for our product. They are also very price conscious and could respond well to a value message.
From this I would suggest
- Linkbuilding to focus on student websites
- Building a separate, country wide, student focused ticket selling domain. This will be incredibly powerful in achieving links not only from education institutions but also being available to use as a countrywide reference point by newspapers, blogs and other references
8. Know When to Move On
I normally do this for the three main competitors and then stop.
By that time I've done three sites I have good feel for the link landscape in the sector and have sponged up most of the available links. Each site after this brings diminishing returns.
That's how I do it. Having a plan to follow makes it easy to sell and less painful to do.
To answer a few questions on the Serp Saturation
What it Does
For a bucket of 100 keywords, the script goes and queries all 100 of those keywords in Google and saves the Top 10 results
Then it just counts the number of time a unique domain has appeared in the Top 10 (so sometimes you can get higher than 100 if Google displays two results from a domain) and orders the list from highest to lowest
You could make it a lot more complex if you like
How to Get one
These tools are not normally widely available as you need to scrape a lot of data from Google. Google doesn't like this and you soon get your IP address blocked
Many companies build a scraper in-house that they use for their clients, but don't make publicaly available (although if anyone knows one, please feel free to share). I have access to such a tool and its a core part of my general research
They are not very complex to make
If you do experiment with making one, start by being very conservative when querying Google and look at using proxies
S
Would I be right in saying there's no API that will allow you to gather SERPs data?
Hi Stephen. Big thanks for this. I agree with everyone else the report is really cool, so I decided to put together my own tool for doing them. It pulls the data in from the SERPs and Linkscape API automatically all into a Google Docs spreadsheet. I wrote a YOUmoz about it here: Competitive Analysis in under 60 Seconds using Google Docs.
Great post and some real actionable takeaways.
"Example of SERP Saturation for a basket of travel industry keywords"
This looks like an interesting data point to study. Can you please give a bit more detail about the calculated metrics - estimated total and saturation? How do you come up with these numbers?
Apologies if I'm asking something blindingly obvious!
I too found this very interesting, so I knocked up a template for people to use to generate a similar report automatically using Google Docs. It is on YOUmoz right here.
Great guide Stephen! I have a couple comments on this bit:
When I see that I have all followed links and no nofollowed links, I know I can target low quality, exact match links with little risk of penalties. In the example above, you can see I need to concentrate on getting links from a wide number of sources.
Cheers Whitespark
1 Absolutely, I dont do the buying mass buying/submit stuff at all. I try and keep things on TBPR2 and up and with decent SEOMOZ DA and DT metrics.
2 Grabbing a wide range of links is indeed my aim (or a range that models whats normal for the vertical), but I try make sure I understand whats gone on before so that a) I don't accidentally step over any quality boundaries and b) I know where to start building first for most impact
I should also have mentioned that the linkbuilding presentations at SEOPRO London are behind a lot of my process and thinking here
S
great post - something to check out with the student sites at universities is if they get indexed or not. I have seen some edus that block any pages after the /~ . something to keep in the back of your mind.
Very throrough post, the only tidbit i would add is the use of advanced search operators for finding viable link opportunties.
Linkbuilding is so valuable to my business, it's great to get a peek at someone else's process. Great post!
I really don't like doing linkbuilding but we all know it's very important. Some great ideas to ensure we are comparing the same factors of the competition's links to yours. The graphs easily display the areas that need more attention than others.
Thank You
I am just glad that someone finally posted an email template. I hate link building but it must be done!
Ive added a few templates here https://seobestpractice.org/Email_linkbuilding_templates including Eric Ward's. Read Eric's linkbuilding post to understand the reason behind what he includes in his emails
Happy to include a few more templates. PM me if you have a template AND reasons for why its written like it is
S
I'm a new SEO working in-house and this has been a helpful post, thanks.
Count me in as another one who'd like to see how you calculate the SERP Saturation - that is of great interest to me and I can't see how it was done.
what you guys think.. Automatic controlled LB is good ?
because i have seen different results.. some where great and some were exceptionally disappointing...
I believe there is no (or almost no) difference on how link building is controlled. Even though, i prefere manual way, I think the more imporant here is how it is done. I mean choosing websites to link from, link anchor texts and how often and in what amount those back-links appear online. The core point here is not to look spammy in Google's eyes.
Stephen,
thanks for the time you spent preparing the post. There are quite many actionable and itneresting tips you suggest. I linked about SERP saturation the most. The only thing I am not 100% agree is that (as far I understood) before defining trategy for link building for a perticular website you learn the competors' strategy and follow it. What the point?
I am sure that every experienced SEO has lots of tactics of him or her own that 100% work. Thus, I believe one should try to get the best links the competitors have only (those links that worth spending time/money on getting them) and definitely use yourown strategies. Google's algorythms work the same way regardless the niche.
Thanks :)
For SERP saturation, there are some great SEO bloggers sharing ways to pull Google search results into Google Docs. Here's one example:
https://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/how-to-build-agile-seo-tools-using-google-docs/
Don't know why the thumbs down there, the guides Distilled have done on Google spreadsheet are a great resource
Link building is usually a challenge for clients but leverage this information into BI make it worth it!
Thanks for a really great post! I am in the process of creating our new real estate site and soon will begin looking for links. This is really helpful.
I found your email request interesting. To me this looks a little impersonal...kind of like the requests that I get daily that say, "I saw your site on Google and felt that my site was a good match. I've already placed a link from my site to yours. You can see it at...." I delete those emails right away.
Have you had good success with people responding to your email?
Oh, and another question, if that is ok. How did you run the "SERP Saturation" report that you have? Thanks (I'm new to using the SEOMoz tools).
Hi Dunamis
I dont think they come across quite as cold as the standard spam request, as in each case I have visited the site, foudn what they do and have a bit of understanding of their vertical.
If I can find anything to personalise it I will. I talk directly to what they get out of it and why my site is specifically a good fit to their audience. So even though its short, it is relevant.
As to "good success" I guess thats going to be relative. I stuck with that format because it worked better than I expected. (I did have low expectation though).
I haven't seen many other examples, which is why I posted my example. Id love to see a few more, broken down by why certain lines are included etc
The thing I wanted to share by posting it, was don't wait around to craft a mythicaly perfect email. Just do it ;)
Thanks Stephen!
Would you mind elaborating on how you got the "SERP Saturation" info? Thanks so much.
Hi Dunamis,
I've made a post about how to create a similar report, complete with a Google Docs template in my YOUmoz post about using Google Docs and the Linkscape API for Competitive Research. Hope it proves helpful! :)
-Tom
For me personally, not even saying please comes across as a little rude. I have two questions:
1. What's your average success rate as a percentage? (Interested to see how it compares with ours).
2. What do you use for the subject line (or do you vary it)?
I definitely wouldn't say please, as I'm not asking for a favour and I don't want to put that idea in their head - the point is to make it seem like Im doing something thats helping their website. If you phrase it right, they should be thanking you ;)
Success % is different for every industry and backlink profile, so I don't think its any decent measure. Having said that, maybe 5%? But getting 1 PR9 is much better than 10 pr1s, so I try not to think of it in a raw numbers
Headlines I try make bland so as not to set off any spam bells - for the trains website, I just used the word Transport
S
Thank you for this post. It is incredibly timely for me.
I especially love the template for the outreach email you provided. This is somewhere I often overthink my response, get intmidated and end up not sending an email at all because I am so worried about saying the right thing. It's silly - especially when contacting media and bloggers. They get so many pitches I would think they appreciate a straightforward explaination of what you need and how it will benefit them. Thanks for the reassurance that I don't need to craft a lengthy, uber-personalized letter to get the link I want.
Good post, some great illistrations too.
I agree with your point about link building should be best done via widgets and what not but for alot of small business customers it is not that easy.
Competitive link building is a great point to start from along side your other methods, but really for big brands most of the links you may never be able to get =(
This is probably entirely the wrong forum to make this point, but here goes anyway:
I get link requests all the time - at least a dozen a week. But they all appear to use the exact same template and they look to me like spam - boy do they look like spam.
I've no intention of asking anyone for a link myself, but I wonder, how do those of us on the recieving end know the difference between a flakey spam-like request and something more genuine?
Hey Bill, Just had a thought about this months after the post :P
When I can't get a link from somewhere I want, then I up the ante
Why not do that yourself? When you get a link request, send a form email that says "if you want a link from me then you need to provide great content for my readers. I take submissions for A, B, C or D types of content" etc
Yes, that would work.
Nice!
Its really a great post. Link building is a back born of seo generating quality links is a process to improve a website to promote key messages and making it more relevant for people surfing the internet.
Like this post. Never thought about checking the whois email address if there is no email on the site. Good strategy that works well also for our Spanish SEO efforts.
What is your experience about the contacting process itself.
When you send an email asking to be added to a resources or comparison page:
1-How long do you wait before sending a second/reminder email?
2-Do you have a template for follow up emails? "Hi, I contacted you a week ago about...."
3-If it is a site with medium Domain Authority, how many times do you follow up before giving up?
4-If you made a cold call to the site owner asking for a partnership, then send an email with the details, and don't get an answer.
Do you follow up another time or is that enough indication that not interested?
"When I see that I have all followed links and no nofollowed links, I know I can target low quality, exact match links with little risk of penalties."
Can you explain your logic here? This seems like a very dangerous assumption.
Here is another great post for if you hate linkbuilding, but with a slightly different take
How to Use Blog Commenting to get valuable Backlinks and Traffic
The essance is to not worry about PR or dofollow when commenting on blogs but to contribute in value adding way, becoming a regular, this should make the task much more fulfilling and enjoyable. If accompanied by good content on your own site then you will attract links casually and naturally from the blogger.
This would be my preferred approach although I do accept it maybe difficult when acting for a client.
What does anyone else think?
I think that it's good in specific circumstances. For example, you love crafting and have an online craft store and/or online blog. It makes sense to form long-term relationships in your niche from a selling perspective as well as link building. On the other extreme, you have an SEO who is working on multiple sites in across completely different niches on a fairly short-term basis. If he or she spends too much time commenting on the same blogs rather than exploring new opportunities, it could be a big waste of time. - Jenni
this shows exactly what we need to follow in Linkbuilding process ..
Love it! Super simple and basic.
I find this post interesting since it has a data to prove it. Well honestly from the start, I so hate link building until Im used to it. It takes time to learn and enjoy a lot.
I am wondering how one could sort in Excel on unique domains first and PA second. Anyone?
Great guide, thanks
Nice article,
I agree with a lot of what's been said here. I particularly agree with the point on reaching out to students since that demographic is probably the most price sensitive one. I should know.
Those charts look interesting as well. A friend mine of who works at a company called SQM (https://goo.gl/OqhqPd) is actually tasked with the whole competitive analysis scene. I'll ask him to have a look at this article and see what his thoughts are since this sort of thing is right up his alley.
In any case, I think its a good article and definitely worth the read.
Hey, some of the great bloggers I met today, it seems. It is always great to read link building tactics of so many different people and find something good from everyone. Kindly share some tools to find competitors for a fashion website.
How can I efficiently build links with blogs comments?
In my opinion there is a great chance to get penalized by Google if you linking strategy pointing to domains that are not reletaed to your main language. Let's say if 30% of you inbound links are going to other language then English(if your web is in English) iI have experienced ranking drops.So, be carefull....not more then %30 it is safe.
Regards
Great post I am going to print this out its what I do but your a lot more organised which in the long term will reap the rewards . Good Job..
Really good insight. It helps me a lot, beacuse, we all hate boring linkbuilding works and most of us are trying to make that job more easier and shorter beacuse a lack of time, but on the other side - we don't want to make some foolish mistakes, doing something in a fast and wrong way. This is ultimate guide how to make all this proces shorter, but keep a good quality of link building research. Thank you.
Great post Stephen, also very good in real time link building process.
Thanks Stephen, linkbuilding is unfortunately necesarry, but at least with this method you have a roadmap of where you are going with it.
Recently I have been having provblems with yell.com beating all my local results for my cctv installers London site, they mainly seem to use hundreds of internal pages interlinking and not many external ones, so I guess theres more than one way to skin a cat.
Great article.
To expand on a couple of things:
1. I agree it's important to find your clients' competitors in the prelim phases of SEO, but that doesn't mean your clients have an accurate or holistic gauge on who their competitors really are. Like Stephen said, many discount the web-only companies and have a poor grasp on how well the ones they do know about do on the web. Great point.
2. I appreciate link building letters that have a more personal feel -- you know, the letter that doesn't seems like a shameless request for a link from the very beginning. On the other hand, results can be seen from a variety of different types of link building letters (to each his own, I guess). Templatizing the letter is essential for saving time and making sure no typographical errors slip through the cracks. Thanks for bringing this up.
Thanks for this post; it couldn't have come at a better time.
Mitch Holt
Great post. Thanks for that. Nice to have a process to folllow. Must make an effort to use this soon. Cheers.
hi great post...do you mind shring the excel file to have a better understaning of the saturation how you got it and how to get it...or take it out
Aaaaaand now I know what I'll be doing this week.
Great post, there are some really good pointers there.
Thanks so much for this - a fair amount of this I was already doing, but some I really wasn't, so gives good ground for even better targeted link building. Much appreciated :-)
Another great, actionable post. I always love looking at others' methods to benchmark and borrow from. Thanks!
Very good post. Title of blog post is very silly. A guide for People who Hate Linkbuilding. I don't hate link building but I read entire post. :) No one can beat competitors & get higher rank over Google without effective linkbuilding.
@Stephen - What a fantastic article, probably one of the best I've read on SEOmoz in the past couple of months. Kudo's to you!
Thanks for writing this up, I am just starting out learning about SEO/SEM myself and this being the first entry I have read on seomoz I know I will be spending more time here, some great tips and info.
I like your extensive use of Excel for your client reports. The majority of my work is only in house, however I've picked up a couple of small link building clients along the way now so need to show them something! One thing I'd suggest thought is to keep the Domain Moz Rank metrics off of your bar chart as they look really out of proportion, and in reality being about 4 or whatever it was is completely fine
Aaron
Nice Post.
I really enjoy hearing about other peoples processes. I think we all share the distaste for link building...especially when we are going up against so many link buyers these days.
I think this is main blog worthy.
Hey, I do a similar thing but have another type of classifier for potenial links being GP - Guest Post where I suggest writing content for the site in return for a BIO link from the post. With this kind of thing though, the plan is half of the battle so just having structure can help you move things forward.
Cheers Marcus
Great post. I hate linkbuilding just as much as you do, but it's a necessary evil. I follow a plan very similiar to yours, I just try not to get to immersed in it or I'll spend a whole day and forget about creating content.
Link building is time consuming and continous process for a website.But always gives better ranking if done with quality.Thanks for sharing post.
Thanks for the post! I too hate link building, rather i am quite lazy at it but have to do it as it is inevitable. I have a small disagreement on point number 5 which seems to be asking for a link and i believe it is reciprocal, right? Getting low quality reciprocal links are just wastage of time and attract the wrath of Google
Hi Batchmaster
Im not asking for reciprocal links. Most of my clients are corporate and I don't have the ability to add links to their site.
However Im not against reciprocal links if the links are good (high quality, within my vertical, within paragraph content etc).
If I need or want to provide reiprocal links, I would normally do so via an article on blog or other property. This happens a lot when running competitions and the competitions sites demand a link
Theres not a one size fits all solution here. Get a bit creative and be willing to go beyond adding people to a list of links
S
All competitor analysis posts are welcome - it's always great to read about new ideas and concepts.Great post!
The really really cool insight and I really love the post! The only point where I believe I would not follow is the outreaching email template part.
I think the email template is too spammy (at least it looks like that). If I would be at your place I would select the more creative template and as Tom of Distilled talk several times personalized the out reaching emails. I think email if contains 3 or 4 lines are ok, I am not in favor of writing 500 words of article in the email but 3 or 4 lines to let the person know this email is not a bulk shoot but people have actually write for you!
Just sharing my opinion!
I like your direct & quick approach. One of the difficulties with linkbuilding at the granular level is the time it takes.
Hey Stephen! Very nice and useful post!
Doing quality link building always helps in achieving and maintaining high rankings.
Thanks for a great post.. I hate it too :D
but thanks to you, now I can see another side of link building..
This is a great article Stephen! How did you run that SERP Saturation report?
great post!
I'm curious if you have a solution to a comment you brought up in your post.
"It is very important to monitor the Domain Authority and homepage Page Authority to make sure that your linkbuilding does not gain links at the expense of reducing your other domain-wide authority metrics."
If you are gaining links but the Domain and Page Authority are going down but you have only intentionally linked to high quality sites, what do you think is a good solution?
"It is very important to monitor the Domain Authority and homepage Page Authority to make sure that your linkbuilding does not gain links at the expense of reducing your other domain-wide authority metrics."
I agree with hilaryh - if you're gaining links, why would the Domain Authority and Page Authority go down? Maybe I need to better understand those metrics...
There is definetely a craft & science to building the nice quality links to a website you just have to be methodical and persistent to getting it done.
Good post. When I email asking for a link, I'll also either include what I've done for them OR start the conversation off by asking them to take a look at what I've done for them (listing them in an industry specific directory I run), confirm the information and then ask for the link.
The rule of reciprocity there really helps the "close rate" for those emails.
If it's a site that wouldn't fit into the directory, then I'll try to figure out what I can do to help them out.
Hi @ CHarkins - are you actively supporting reciprocals? I'm reasonably new to this game, but I thought that Panda and the latest updates took a pretty dim view of reciprocal linking. What's the general take on this?
Unrelated reciprical linking is not something that I do. But, if I'm giving news on a specific industry and then link to other business in that industry it doesn't look out of place for those businesses to refer back to my site's news section.
Think about how linking worked before all of the monitization got involved and that was how people manually built links to each other. If you also look at popular blogs, they will link back to stories that mention their site or their authors even when those stories include a link to the blog in question. That's a pretty natural response ("Hey, look at this site and what they said about me/us").
Now, if you have a site about dog beds and suddenly you're linking to sites about maxing out your bench press, yeah - that wouldn't look right.
nice sharing thanks.
Link Building is a mystery for me, everyone do just he or she like no analysis, no tracking
Link building is art and science. Through, say, link profiling, you can find lists of related sites, analyze their authority and trustrank, etc. The actual execution (the creation of links on those targeted pages) is usually more artistic (or at least, crafty). Even things like linkbaiting include measurement and application of information gleaned from the data measured to make artistic, or crafty, decisions.
Thanks for the post! Whenever I am sending out a request for a link, I always do my research on the site and am sure to compliment some aspect of their site that shows I really looked at it (not something generic like background).
Why do people hate linkbuilding so much, unless you hate your job altogether - as this is the majority of it.
Just don't quite understand that.
But all in all, if you're going to go the competitive analysis route, this is a pretty good approach - but what do you do from that point forward? Where do you work on your links from then on, if you only do the top three?
IMO - starting with the "what do you do next" is often more important - and can bring better & faster results. But it does take a good bit of finesse to accomplish.
Mate, it's the rejection that everybody hates. And you also feel a bit like a salesman offering a product by knocking on people's doors. :)
Nice way of putting that Dejan!